Where Do Pictures Go When They Die? (1934) 🇺🇸

Are they forgotten, these stars of yester-year, these Rudolph Valentinos, George Walshes, Marie Prevosts, Priscilla Deans and others whose names once shone in lights over the entrances of countless movie houses in the pre-talkie era? [Rudolph Valentino, George Walsh, Marie Prevost, Priscilla Dean]

by Robert Eichberg

No! Their films live on, and the stars we have forgotten still thrill thousands all over the world. It is true, their names have vanished from your town and mine, from the columns of the daily papers and the film publications. But up in Harlem at a theatre catering exclusively to negro trade, in a civic center just off the Bowery, in a Long Island madhouse, a school for the deaf, several hundred cross-road stores throughout the south and mid-west, in South America, the Philippines and a dozen tiny European cities, even in Paris, the capital of sophistication, silent pictures which you enjoyed ten or fifteen years ago attract crowds of people who take the old films just as seriously as you and I do the latest epic production.

Visit some of these theatres. Though the pictures are old, they’re so different from the talkies that they seem like something new, and the audiences are even a better show than the screen.

The pictures themselves seem odd enough. The first thing you notice is that all the cast seems to be overacting. They’re always in motion, gesticulating rather wildly. But after the first couple of reels you grow accustomed to it; you realize that pantomime is an art — a lost art since the talkies have come.

I went to a number of theatres to find out something about the heaven of the films — the place to which good pictures go when they die. I expected to be amused, to get a laugh out of seeing people who could find interest in antique movies. There were a few laughs, but there was something else, something that squeezed the heart.

Definitely on the serious side are the showings given at the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes every Tuesday at 7:00 P. M. Dr. Harris Taylor, the principal of the school, invited me to attend one of the performances. The picture was Paramount’s The Vanishing Pioneer, featuring Jack Holt.

Somehow one expects kids to be noisy and excited when they’re going to a free movie. And there were 257 kids here, ranging from six to twenty years old, lined up in the corridors and waiting to go into the big room where camp chairs had been set up to accommodate them.

Well, they were excited all right, but they weren’t noisy. The only sound was the restless scuffle of feet. The silence hit you in waves. It got you. Kids have a right to make a racket when they’re happy, and these youngsters couldn’t!

George Fairhead, one of Dr. Taylor’s assistants, took me into the impromptu theatre. We stood where we could watch the audience as well as the screen. The youngsters were so thrilled they could scarcely stay in their chairs. Although the school teaches them lip reading, in their excitement they forgot, and their fingers flew incessantly as they talked together in the deaf-and-dumb sign language. All were discussing movies, Mr. Fairhead translated. They’re real movie fans, for the joys of concerts and radio are impossible for them.

They go to the talkies, but find no great pleasure in them, for the speaking screen relies so much on dialogue to carry the plot. There isn’t enough action for people who can’t follow the lines.

Suddenly the room went dark and a beam of light from the projector struck the screen. Gradually the kids quieted down and sat rigid and enthralled, gazing at a film which at first seemed like a burlesque of a motion picture, with its accentuated action and highly dramatic subtitles.

A wagon train wound slowly across the American desert. Men, walking beside horses or oxen, staggered and fell. A woman picked up a canteen, shook it, then uncorked it and held it upside down to show that it was empty. A subtitle clinched the idea that thirst was beginning to take its toll of the pioneers.

In the audience, faces reflected a deep concern. This was something they could understand. They could see what suffering the pioneers were undergoing.

Then the scene shifted. Off in the distance you saw a pool, with a few straggling trees growing around it. One of the pictured pioneers saw it, too. He ran forward a few halting steps, then fell to his knees, raising his arms and eyes to heaven. You didn’t need the subtitle to tell you he was thanking his Maker for deliverance — that he felt much as Moses must have felt when the stream gushed from the rock.

And the kids? They didn’t have to wait for the subtitle either. You knew they got it, for it was then that they made the first sound which came from them all evening. A great sigh, like a rush of wind through the tree-tops, went up when they realized that the caravan was saved.

Not only are dramatic pictures favorites with the deaf children, but Westerns, too. Charlie Chaplin continues high in popularity.

Occasionally, during an exciting moment, one or two of the children become vocal for a moment, giving a little, formless, strangled cry, more pathetic even than the silence because of its very incoherence.

They’re not as interested in stars as in plot. They’d rather see a film with a lot of action than almost anything else. Some of the pictures they saw and which you may recall are “David Copperfield,” Old Ironsides, Nanook of the North, “A Kiss for Cinderella,” “Swim, Girl, Swim,” “Molly Make-Believe” and Casey at the Bat. A Bill Hart [William S. Hart] picture is always welcome, by the way, for he gave his fans action a-plenty.

But we must be moving on. There are too many odder places for us to linger here.

Suppose we make a long jump, say, to the Ghetto in New York’s lower east side, just a few blocks from the Bowery. There’s a large building on the corner of East Broadway and Jefferson Street — the Educational Alliance, where boys and girls and their parents come in quest of knowledge — foreigners who want to learn to become good Americans.

The building is a social center, with Mothers’ Clubs, Fathers’ Clubs, gymnasiums and an assembly room equipped with a stage and real theatre seats. Every night the assembly hall is used as a movie theatre, housing the strangest audience that I have ever seen.

Tonight the feature picture is “The Greatest Race,” produced in 1925, and a photographic record of Captain Ronald Amundsen’s trip to the North Pole. The admission charge is a nickel, if you have it. If you haven’t, you can come in anyway. The nickels pay for the night’s rental of the film which amounts to about two dollars.

The audience begins to get there about seven, though the show doesn’t start until eight. They sit and talk, and it’s pretty deafening. All that is spoken is Yiddish and a few phrases of Russian or Polish, with an occasional burst of Ukrainian. It’s hard to believe that you’re in America, for the people who come here are the real immigrants.

Isidore Miller gets up on the platform and there is an immediate outburst of violent “shushing.”

The old picture flickers into life. Miller speaks. He tells the crowd what the title says about the gallant Norwegian, and then mentions Peary. America always gets its full share of the credit here, for our immigrants have already begun to feel a pride in their new home. You can see the bent shoulders straighten whenever America is mentioned.

They like serious problem pictures. Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was one they enjoyed. But, even better than the standard pictures, they like films dealing with Jewish life, or containing Jewish characters.

With that feeling, it was rather a surprise to know that they had liked Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel.” I asked one of the ushers to explain this, for I thought that Hitlerism would have set them against all German stars. “Why shouldn’t they like her?” he said. “To them she’s just another actress. They don’t stop to think whether she’s German or not.”

Harry Houdini’s old picture, “Haldane of the Secret Service,” got a rousing welcome after Mr. Miller had explained that the great magician was “one of our boys,” and another old film, “Just a Mother,” touched a high spot for the year.

They understand simple tales of family life, but pent-house parties are alien, dealing with locales which they will never see and types of people they will never meet. Life in America to them is not a round of parties — it’s a serious struggle to keep food in their children’s stomachs, clothes on their backs and a roof over their heads.

And now for some comic relief. Let’s go to Harlem, where the carefree high-yallers and chocolate browns put on their finery and step out to the Renaissance, premier theatre for the colored, on a Saturday night. The feature is Rudolph Valentino, the greatest lover of the screen, in Blood and Sand. In the supporting cast are two other old favorites, Nita Naldi and Lila Lee, who enact the rôles of his temptress and his wife, respectively.

A little colored girl eating an ice cream cone sold me a ticket for twenty cents. A colored usher led me to a seat. Negroes of all sorts surrounded me. Giggling girls, a white-haired couple, a truck driver, wearing a sweater, and a brown Beau Brummel with padded shoulders, carefully balancing a pearl-gray derby on his knee, sat near me. The theatre showed a true cross section of Negro life.

A talkie cartoon of Popeye was on when I arrived. The picture was “I Eats My Spinach,” and the climax came when Popeye, floored by a bull, quickly crammed a handful of the horrendous vegetable into his mouth and knocked the beast into a string of sausages. “Mm-mm,” said Sam, sitting behind me, “see whut spinnidge does fo’ you!”

“Yeah,” drawled his companion, “but is it wuth it?”

Then the feature came on. It was old and scratched in spots. You could tell that it had been frequently broken and patched, because there were parts missing which caused various scenes to end suddenly. But it was still a good picture. You didn’t miss the voices of the cast, for Spanish phonograph records supplied an acceptable musical background.

This particular audience and theatre were much like any other, save for one or two things. For example, all during the showing men selling pop and peanuts wandered up and down the aisles, crying their wares. Also, a half-dozen pickaninnies got into a squabble over some entry blanks in a contest the theatre was running.

During intermission, the manager of the theatre made a contest announcement. After getting the audience’s attention, he said, “You can win a cash prize by guessing nearest the number of people who attend this theatre in a year. We have 850 seats, and four shows a day, 365 days in the year. Now keep that in mind when you’re writing your answers. I don’t know what you people are thinking about, because one old woman wrote ‘Three bundles’ and a man wrote ‘A lot of kids and six dogs.’ I don’t understand it.”

Sam and Will, the two fellows behind me, had a grand time. When Valentino was playing around with Dona Sol (Naldi) a subtitle said, “The last place to hear of a man’s amours is his home,” and Sam remarked, “Oh-oh! Does I hope he’s right!” Sam, apparently, was something of a sheik.

The vamp, though, is definitely outmoded as far as Harlem is concerned. A shot of Miss Naldi reclining on a couch and smoking cigarettes in a long holder while an Indian slave strummed a mandolin brought chuckles; Rudy’s arm around herself when she unrapped resulted in hearty guffaws, and when she bit his hand and he threw her to the ground, where she lay panting with passion, Sam remarked, “Uh-uh. Dat man don’t cooperate a-tall!”

A bit of superstition cropped up at the end, when Valentino was gored by a bull in the arena, and died. “See,” said Sam, “it’s bad luck to play dead. They he is, daid on de screen, an a little while later he’s daid in his coffin.”

Another Valentino favorite was The Sheik, with Agnes Ayres.

Now, before we go to the mad house — yes, literally to the insane asylum, for a look at another picture audience, let’s consider a few more places where the old films survive.

Home movies are one. If you have a projector, costing anywhere from $4 to $400, many of the better known features are yours to command, and can be rented for a few dollars a night. One film rental library lists William S. Hart in “The Grim Gunman,” Rudolph Valentino in “The Wonderful Chair,” Bryant Washburn and Billie Dove in “Try and Get It,” Hoot Gibson in “Home Run Swat.”

Another lists Harry Carey and Kathleen Collins in “Border Patrol,” Alan Hale [Alan Hale Sr.] and Renée Adorée in “The Spieler,” and Robert Armstrong and Carole Lombard in “Big News.”

And these are only two out of nearly a dozen companies specializing in prints of by-gone features, reissued in smaller size for home use.

Down in Georgia particularly, and throughout the South, little cross-road stores push back the cracker barrels of a Saturday night, put some planks across some boxes and convert the store into a Palace of the Cinema.

The charge is ten cents a head — no children or colored folk admitted, much like the days of which Mark Twain once wrote. The negroes and kids are allowed to stand outside the doors and windows, craning their necks to catch what they can of the films.

The outlands, oddly enough, seem to go for the more sophisticated subjects; that is, within reason. A woman who sins is interesting only if she pays the penalty, and the storekeeper hears some unpleasant remarks if she doesn’t suffer.

They like their sophistication to have a strain of tender young love running through it, so they can feel that “These rich people are human, like we are.”

Throughout Europe there are similar showings. I cannot speak for the whole continent, for the only theatres I visited were in the little towns outside of Paris. There the ancient American films were no novelty. They were an accepted fact, looked upon as being as much a part of life as our talkies are to us. Raymond Griffith, Harold Lloyd and, of course, Charlie Chaplin were the favorites. The theatres didn’t even have to put their last names on the signs. A big banner bearing only the magic word “Chariot” was always enough to pack a theatre.

The audiences at these theatres were of the peasant, artisan class. You pay your few francs at the window where the proprietor’s wife or daughter presides. The theatre owner himself takes your ticket at the door. One of his sons is an usher, the other runs the projection machine (and, if the film breaks, as it often does, shouts for Papah to come and help,) and other assorted relatives act as ushers.

The theatre is so small it doesn’t really need ushers, but in France the usher must be tipped, and it would break a true theatre owner’s heart to have a sou or so get out of the family. The music is played by another daughter, who pounds out “Hearts and Flowers” on the piano, just as the girls used to do in small American theatres, before the pictures learned to speak for themselves.

Even more informal are the showings in Puerto Rico and South America. In both these places the theatres are barns. This, of course, does not apply to the larger cities, many of which have some really fine modern theatres, but to the backwoods districts.

To these cinemas come the few Europeans and Americans whose business compels them to be there, and hordes of natives. The natives take the pictures so seriously that they even try to take part in the screen performance, shouting advice to the hero and abuse at the villain.

Now, back to America. By the way, did you know that a number of colleges and universities are in the moving picture business? Well, they are! In Iowa, Texas and California leading institutions of learning make a little extra income by buying films and renting them out to rural exhibitors. Most of the pictures in which they deal are educationals — but the old silent features are found here, too. They are largely shown in the cross-road stores previously described.

I told you, at the beginning of this article, that silent films were still shown in mad houses. I intended to describe such a showing to you. But I’ve changed my mind.

Horror pictures are seldom popular, for they are sometimes so gruesome that they give us a feeling of mental nausea. A visit to an insane asylum is like that. You wake up at night in a cold sweat afterwards. You’re filled with horror and pity for the unfortunates who must end their days there, alive only in body, mentally dead and in hell.

I will tell you this. The Brooklyn State Hospital for mental diseases formerly showed its patients old pictures twice a month. Since then these showings have been discontinued. The accommodations for the audience, it was explained to me, were inadequate, resulting in too much disorder. The hospital on Ward’s Island recently installed sound equipment, and shows the most modern talkies it can secure.

The patients at an asylum in remote Long Island are shown old silent films every other week and enjoy them very much. They recently witnessed “His Foreign Wife” and “Aisles of Glory.” At a similar institution in New Jersey the feature was a Western — “Saddle Mates.”

For the most part, the patients are orderly as the pictures are shown. But, occasionally, the excitement proves too much. One of the guards told me that a certain patient used to suffer from the delusion of being Douglas Fairbanks [Douglas Fairbanks Sr.] for several days after each performance, and would attempt to leap onto his shoulders from high places. Another became deeply sad, for she believed that she was Theda Bara, and that there was a conspiracy to keep her from resuming her rightful place in Hollywood.

Fortunately there were few who were affected adversely by the pictures. The majority were more cheerful and more lucid after this brief contact with the world again. The one aim of the doctors at the asylums is to improve their patients, and the showings would be discontinued were they not beneficial.

Discontinued — as they are being discontinued everywhere else, for gradually the old pictures are dying. Eighteen months ago, thirty-two theatres in New York were showing them regularly. Today, none are. In my pursuit of their last strongholds, I have made dozens of visits and hundreds of phone calls to theatres, producers, societies, homes, distributors, motion picture boards of trade, exporters and the like.

A year ago I knew a burlesque house in Harlem that always showed an old silent Western or similar thriller during a long intermission — and more people walked out during the dances than did while the picture was on.

A year ago I visited a dingy little theatre in the Bowery, where I saw battered bums, spending the dimes they needed for coffee and a bed, giving their last cent for just one more glimpse of glamor. That theatre is boarded up today.

A year ago there were many agents busy booking silent films. Today I called up one who had been the acknowledged leader in the field. “The telephone,” said the operator, “has been discontinued for some time.”

Yes, the old silent pictures live on. But, like the buffalo which once swarmed over our plains, they are rapidly becoming extinct.

As the prints now in existence become more and more torn and scratched, they will be discarded. New prints will not be made, for there isn’t enough money in silent pictures to make it a profitable enterprise. A few of the older negatives will be saved, so that scenes from them can be flashed upon the screen as a curiosity. But most of them will go to the reducing plant, where they will be junked and the silver from the emulsions on them reclaimed.

Silent pictures — the basis upon which a great industry and a great nation’s entertainment tastes have been built — will have gone from the world forever.

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(Left) Remember that red hot love thriller called The Sheik? Of course you do. It definitely established the late Rudolph Valentino and added fresh laurels to Agnes Ayres’ cinematic crown. Here they are in one of the picture’s most beautiful scenes.

(Below) the forlorn-looking gentleman, parked in the midst of the snowy waste, is Charlie Chaplin and the film from which the picture was taken was called The Gold Rush. It made the star a million dollars.

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(Above) Charlie again, this time with the adorable Jackie Coogan. The Kid was the film in which they appeared together. Its release put Jackie on the movie map.

(Left) Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” still going the rounds.

(Below) The late Lon Chaney as Mr. Wu. Here is an actor whose silent films prove to be hits today.

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don’t be an Airedale

X-Bazin removes hair

“Airedale” — that’s what Hollywood calls a girl with hair on arms and legs. “Airedales” have ruined many a movie close-up — because superfluous hair shows as plainly in the pictures as it does upon the beach. That’s why all Hollywood uses X-Bazin to remove hair. X-Bazin (cream or powder) is essential for legs arms and under-arms that expect to be seen!

Constant research and improvement have made X-Bazin more and more mild, more and more efficient, more and more agreeable. This really reliable powder or cream depilatory leaves your skin exquisitely smooth, white and hairless — without irritation, stubble or that blue, shaved look. Even the future growth of hair is retarded.

Insist on reliable X-Bazin — accept no substitutes. Powder or cream at drug and department stores — only 50¢. Good size tubes of X-Bazin cream, 10¢ in 5-and-10 cent stores. Hall & Ruckel, Inc. Est. 1848. Brooklyn, N. Y.

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Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, August 2024